Cleo Wilkinson - Artist

One of the a few artists working today in the mezzotint printmaking technique Cleo Wilkinson graduated with first class honours degree from Elam Art School (Auckland University) New Zealand .She has continued with further recent studies at Oxford University - Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art ,UK, New York Academy of Fine Art NYC, the Art Students League of New York, Grand Central Academy of Art , NYC USA , Barcelona Atelier of Realist Art , Spain and Graduate Diploma in Library and Information Science (Australia).

A recipient of over 50 major international and national print awards her work is also included in prestigious public, private and corporate collections worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) .

Her work has been included in over 300 International Print Exhibitions and Competitions throughout UK,Europe, Asia , Australia/Oceania, North America, South America .Cleo is regularly invited to judge international printmaking competitions.

Cleo has taken this complex delicate and most physically demanding of all art forms to great heights and diversity. Each image shows a great range of tonal depth which is only obtained through painstaking burnishing of the plate and many trial printings. She has also designed a unique handcrafted roulette to grind the plate which creates a rare stippled texture to the images.

The mezzotint process was invented by Ludwig Von Seigen in Amsterdam in 1642. It is a laborious and time consuming technique for creating a print and primarily for this reason it is not widely used today.

The mezzotint has rightly been described the most complex of all art forms. Mezzotint is among the most physically demanding mediums in art, once tried and quickly abandoned as “too difficult” for example by the great printmaker MC Escher.

A copper or zinc plate is “rocked” with a curved, notched blade until the surface is entirely pitted. At this stage an inked plate would print a rich uniform black. The artist then uses a scraper or burnisher to flatten the raised parts, a little for dark greys, a lot for light greys, completely for white (after inking and wiping, the plate holds no ink where it is smooth).

The result of this process is an image emerging from pitch black “nothingness” a true analogue to creation. Outlines are simplified by absence of line, while substance is rendered with a virtually infinite range of tonal subtlety.

No other art can give birth to such magnificent areas of light and shade as this purely tonal medium. Imagery is permeated by mystical elements derived from the unique spatial relationships of the mezzotint medium. This technique demands a long involved process the artist can be very closely working on a plate for at least 100 hours before even starting to print the image.